


Letter

by ylic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (The Non-Con Is NOT Between The Main Pairing), Almost A Suicide Attempt, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Angst, Coming Out, Depression, Emotional Baggage, Explicit Language, Family, Food Issues, Growing Up, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Con Due To Drunkenness, POV Second Person, References to Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, References to self-harm, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2013-06-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 20:48:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ylic/pseuds/ylic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have your fights, and you have your bad days when the nightmares come back. You read about other people in the papers, and sometimes you think that you didn’t have it so bad after all. At least your story had a happy ending. And yet, be as that may, it still hurts too much to talk about, because a part of you will always be that hurt teenager. You can talk for 3 solid hours about your research until your students start to complain behind your back that you love the sound of your own voice. But despite that, you are struck dumb when you are told to talk about yourself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letter

**Author's Note:**

> Please heed the tags, particularly the " **non-con** due to drunkenness" one, which is why I tagged this as "Rape/Non-Con". Nothing is particularly graphic, at least by my standards, but this story is likely to make most people uncomfortable. 
> 
> Proofread by myself, but unbetaed. This writing style is something of an experiment.
> 
> [Edit 4th June: I just realised that the age of consent is different in my country and that I should have also warned this for being "Underage" in addition to "Rape/Non-Con", since AO3 specifies eighteen and under for "Underage". (The non-con takes place when the character is 17.) Sorry for my oversight - I hope nobody was adversely affected by it.]
> 
> [Edit 5th June: Deleted and re-wrote a sentence that had been bugging me ever since I posted this. Now I think it is more or less a final version. I'm still wondering if I should change the ages because the realisation that this does go under the "Underage" tag makes me somewhat uncomfortable, but I don't think I'll change it, simply because the whole story will have to be reworked.]

The first time you notice the signs of four thick hairs growing on your groin, you don’t tell anyone. You had just come home from school, and had been taking a piss. You realise it’s starting to happen to you, and you feel a little sick. It feels a little like the apocalypse – you knew it was going to happen, puberty, just like the slides your health teacher showed you in class, and just like the fire and brimstone your pastor preached about at church. You feel dizzy and you can feel the pasta you ate at the school canteen gurgling in your stomach, so you lie down in your bed, wrap yourself in your covers, and tell yourself it’s okay.

Your mum walks into your bedroom when you don’t come down for dinner later, and puts a hand on your forehead. She announces that you don’t have a fever, but you tell her you feel sick, and that it must have been something you ate. She leaves a basin, a toilet roll, and a glass of water on your bedside table, and lets you sleep.

The next day, she packs you a sandwich for lunch, and calls the school management to raise their canteen hygiene standards. You’re embarrassed and feel more than a little guilty (because the canteen ladies are nice – they smile at you and call you sweetie), but it’s only the beginning of the lies that pepper your adolescence.

You notice you feel crankier, a little depressed, volatile. You’re more likely to snap at your mother, and she is worried. It’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and sometimes, you vomit for no discernable reason, though you don’t tell your mum. You’re thankful that you only share your bathroom with your brother, because you don’t want her to find out. Your brother is sworn to secrecy, and you sacrifice a lot of things for that, like showering first and getting the tender, less oily part of the chicken roast that you both like. You don’t want her to worry about you more than she does already, and you don’t like it when she fusses over you. It makes you feel like there’s something not normal about you, something really wrong.

Your 14th summer is the worst. You develop blinding headaches that either leave you gagging or dizzy with the pain. On your own, you devour eight boxes of paracetamol in three weeks, and you find yourself tucking each empty box and pill strip into your school bag to throw away discreetly when summer’s out. Even your brother starts to worry about you, and you sincerely wonder if you’re going to die.

There’s only so much you can hide from your mum, though, and one afternoon, you pass out in the middle of the kitchen while you’re pouring yourself a glass of juice. Orange juice and glass pepper the floor around you, and pieces of glass cut into your shoulder and back as you land on your left side. Your brother carries you to the car, and your mum drives you to the A&E at the university hospital, where they have your brain scanned in case you have a tumour. There isn’t a tumour, thankfully, and the doctors send you home with some prescription painkillers that work better than the paracetamols. Your left shoulder is wrapped up in bandages and you wonder if it’ll scar. You get on with life.

You go back to school, and there’s a new boy. Your classmate. You’re asked to show him around the school since you have more or less the same classes, and every time his arm brushes against yours, your insides lurch uncomfortably. He’s beautiful, with his mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes, and you’re embarrassed, because he deserves better than a social reject like you to be seen with on his very first day. At lunchtime, he sits with you obligingly, and you watch him eat his burger like he hasn’t had a square meal in weeks. You give him yours, and he eats it too. 

You don’t expect him to hang around. And you’re right. The next day, he’s with a group of your classmates, already mixing and looking like he’s been at this school for longer than you. You go back to your corner of the canteen and stare at your burger for the whole lunch hour. You knew this was going to happen, but you’re disappointed, and that frustrates you. You pointedly avoid your brother’s gaze.

The first time you masturbate properly, it’s to a picture of some male model from an advertisement in your mother’s Women’s Weekly magazine. He has mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes. There’s a smattering of light freckles across his shoulder. You think they’re sexy as hell, but you also think that he is probably self-conscious about them, because you’re self-conscious about your imperfections, like the mole on your back and the scars on your legs.

You come all over the magazine, so you go to the backyard and burn it with the leaves you raked earlier. You watch the smoke rise and can’t help but laugh; in that smoke there are the remains of your sperm, impregnating the sky. Parts of you will be assimilated into whoever breathes the air. You take the ashes and stir them into the compost bin. Next year, the corpses of your sperm will give birth to the fruits of summer. You realise there’s so much more to giving life than mere reproduction. Death, too, brings life.

That night, you’re hit with the crashing realisation that you’ve known this all along. You’ve never liked girls. At least, not in the way that you like boys. You’re terrified. Your brother is going to tease you, and your mother is going to cry. You’re going to go to hell. It’s everything the pastors at church warned about, and more. You’re not dumb. You’re no longer the child who listens to his pastor and believes every word. You know it’s not wrong, and if anyone else had told you they were gay, you would have told them that it was no big deal. But it feels different, now that you know it’s you.

You fall asleep on your knees.

You gather up all of your courage for three weeks to go to your school’s LGBTQ Society get-together. There are all kinds of people, and you think it’s okay to be open, so you talk to a boy who introduces himself as a peer advisor, and open up. You tell him about your doubts; about how you’re not sure if you’re gay or if you just haven’t found the right girl. Those words sound strange coming out of your mouth – girl, boy – and it’s difficult to swallow. He tells you you’re wrong, that you’re insecure about your gayness, that you should be proud of being gay, because you have to be the change that you want to see in the world. You know he means well, but you leave the get-together feeling more lost than before.

During your 15th summer, you shoot up a whole twenty centimetres in a matter of three months, and it hurts. Your knees feel like someone is going at them with a jackhammer. You feel dizzy all the time, and you don’t know how to hold yourself anymore because your body feels different and wrong. You feel stretched; you’ve grown, but you haven’t filled out, and the canteen ladies try to feed you more.

You dive headfirst into studying, if only to stop thinking about the mousy-brown haired, hazel-green eyed boy who sometimes catches you staring. Every time those hazel-green eyes meet yours, you feel like you’re going to turn into a pillar of salt.

The first time you come out to your mother, you’re 16, and she does cry. It’s an awful, wracking noise, and later, in your bedroom, you punch the wall. You’re not sure why you chose to come out that day. It’s impulsive and unplanned, and you regret it, but the cat is out of the bag. The second time, she’s angry, and the third time, she cries again. There are so many times, because you’ve come to realise that coming out isn’t a single event that happens and then goes. It’s a process, or maybe this is just the case for your family. Every time, you sit down with your mother at the dining table and talk about how you feel, how it is for you. Every time, it leaves you reeling to the point that you’re hiding bottles of vodka under your bed so you can drink yourself to sleep.

You briefly wonder if this is what cancer patients feel like when they go through chemotherapy – having to suffer before going back to what they hope would be a state of normalcy. And then you remember your grandfather, how much he suffered from the chemo, how he could only eat half a grape a day towards the end, and you feel guilty for comparing. Nobody dies from coming out, do they? You ask yourself, and suddenly, you’re not sure. You’ve read about the suicides. And then you realise that somewhere inside, you still think of your homosexuality as a disease, and you resent yourself for it. When it becomes too much, you shift the blame to the church, to your pastor, and to your mother. You yell at her, until you realise this only makes it worse.

Your brother hears every conversation from the living room but doesn’t talk to you about it, so you thank god for small mercies.

By the time you’re 17, your mother has more or less accepted the fact that you are gay. She’s not happy about it, but she doesn’t cry about it anymore. You’ve stopped with the “coming out” conversations for the sake of your sanity. Your brother decides to go to college nearby and live at home. You’re secretly thankful, because he’s better at dealing with her, and you’re not sure what you would do it if was just the two of you at home.

You stop going to church.

For some stupid reason, you talk yourself into sending an anonymous candygram to the mousy-brown haired, hazel-green eyed boy on Valentine’s Day. For some stupid reason, you think that maybe it will be special. On the day itself, you spot him in the car park, carrying an armful of the bright red candygrams and tossing them into the bin.

He didn’t even bother to eat the candy. 

You try to convince yourself that it doesn’t bother you, but it does, immensely. To your horror, you start crying on the way home and by the time you step through your front door, you’re sobbing uncontrollably. Your mum asks you what’s the matter, but you shove past her and lock yourself in your room for the night. You hate that it bothers you so much, but the thought only makes you cry harder.

You skip school the next day, tell your mum you’re sick, and sleep until 4PM. You drink from 8 to 10 and then you sneak out of your window, and walk to the shadiest looking bar in town in your brother’s clothes. You hang around near the back and let yourself be picked up by a strange man in a V-neck. He tries to fuck you, but it hurts too much, and he tells you to get out when you start to cry. You walk home, and you shower. There’s bloody water running down your legs, and it scares you so much, you can’t stop shaking. You sit in the bathtub and you remember the sensation of the man’s hand against your crotch, inching its way towards your anus like a spider. You tumble out of the tub and throw up until you taste blood.

The next morning, your brother finds you passed out on the bathroom floor. He cleans you up while you cry, and you hate the fact that even the sensation of his touch on your hip makes you nauseous. More than anything, you hate the fact that your brother doesn’t say anything, even though it must be blindingly obvious, from the ruined briefs you left so carelessly in a heap on the floor. Because that’s all your brother does. That’s his way of coping; pretending that these things aren’t happening. You don’t blame him for it. You know he has demons in his past that you can’t even begin to imagine.

It’s your last year of high school, and you feel like you’ve fucked it up beyond redemption.

Your mum doesn’t find out about the details. Your brother loves her enough not to tell her, because the truth would break her. But she notices the small things, how you shy away from her touch and hide yourself away in hoodies and baggy trousers that are three sizes too big.

One night, while watching television, she breaks down and asks you where her little boy went, the boy who used to memorise Psalms like they were nursery rhymes and kiss her good-night on both cheeks. You wonder too, and you mourn with her for the part of you that died a long time ago.

The boy with mousy brown hair and hazel-green eyes gets a girlfriend.

You don’t go to graduation. You see no reason to. You feel stupid and childish for it, but you just end up not going. You collect your graduation scroll from the general office the day after, and go to see your English teacher one last time. Your mum takes you and your brother to a studio to have a family photograph taken. You realise that you don’t have any family photographs, and though you won’t admit it, you do want one, even if the three of you are all that is left of this family.

You decide to go to a university out of town – out of state, in fact. You get a new haircut. It makes you feel stupid, but you practice smiling in the mirror. You’re determined not to fuck this up.

You pack everything that you want to take with you into one suitcase, and hop onto a bus. You don’t look back. It’s a 10-hour bus ride, but you sleep most of the way.

The first week, you spend going to every single orientation activity it is possible to go to without being in two places at once. His new phone gets fifty-six new numbers, but none of them call or text.

You feel foolish for having expected more, and dive back into your studies again.

You don’t call your mum or your brother, and when your mum calls, you yell at her. Gradually you start skipping your classes, and eventually, you stop going to them at all. Angry emails from your professors turn into worried ones. And then one day, you decide you’ve had enough. You step out onto the balcony. You’re on the tenth floor, and there’s no way you could possibly survive this. You lean over the railing when…

“Hey, be careful.”

You look to your left, and you see a boy with mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes staring at you. You sway on your feet, and he looks alarmed.

“You alright?”

Somehow, the two of you end up going to get some food, though it’s the school café, and it’s just coffee and pie. The boy looks at you with an odd look in his eyes, but thankfully, you just make small talk and skirt around the edges of the elephant you both know is in the room.

He comes into your room uninvited and brings you dinner. You slowly start eating again, taking care of yourself again, and going to classes again. One day, you come to, and realise what’s happening to you. You’re confused. And when you’re confused, you run away. You avoid the boy for two weeks until he knocks at your door and threatens to break it down.

You give in, and right then and there, he kisses you.

Something shatters inside you.

You kiss him back.

The rest of university life is a glimmering blur. You can’t believe what is happening, and you’re a little afraid. The first few times you try to have sex, you end up panicking and having flashbacks, but he’s patient and understanding. He tells you he loves you. You don’t believe him at first, but he makes you believe by showing you, and that’s more than anyone has done for you. You slowly begin to accept that he loves you, and that you love him back. You don’t talk to him about the day at the balcony – you’re not ready yet, but you can tell he thinks about it and has come to his own conclusions. Sometimes you marvel that fact that he stays with you despite it - and then you realise you're not the only one who wonders this sort of thing. Slowly it dawns upon you that maybe you sometimes make things out to be worse than they actually are.

Your mum and your brother come into town for your graduation, and you smile and wave as you collect your degree scroll, summa cum laude. That night, you introduce the boy with mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes to your family. Your mum is instantly charmed. He and your brother trade light-hearted jabs, which is a good sign.

You decide to pursue a Masters degree in this state while doing translation jobs on the Internet. Your boy with mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes takes up a job as a mechanic, and you rent an apartment together.

Five years on, and you are a professor. (It’s funny how little there is to talk about when things mostly go your way.) Your not-quite-a-boy-anymore with mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes owns an auto repair shop, and the two of you are engaged. You’re still waiting for the state to allow it, because eight years of academia have made you into a stickler for detail, and you refuse to go around saying that you are civil-unioned to him. Your teenage self would scoff, but you decide after all that you like the sound of the word “married”.

You trade engagement rings, because to hell if the two of you are going to sit down and talk about who’s the “wife” in the relationship. It’s nothing fancy; just matching silver bands, but the weight of it on your finger means the world to you.

When you tell your mum, she cries a little, and tells you how happy she is for you. It's the one thing you always wanted to hear from her, and you’re so happy that you start crying in the middle of the restaurant and can’t stop. Your mum takes you back to your apartment and fusses over you while your husband-to-be looks on with an expression that suggests both amusement and sadness.

When the time comes, you will be married in a church. The two of you will wear suits – one white, and one black. You will wear the white one, because you’re still a good, obedient altar boy at heart and you like the idea of purity.

You have your fights, and you have your bad days when the nightmares come back. You read about other people in the papers, and sometimes you think that you didn’t have it so bad after all. At least your story had a happy ending. And yet, be as that may, it still hurts too much to talk about, because a part of you will always be that hurt teenager. You can talk for 3 solid hours about your research until your students start to complain behind your back that you love the sound of your own voice. But despite that, you are struck dumb when you are told to talk about yourself.

So you type this letter in your office, and hope that your boy with mousy-brown hair and hazel-green eyes will understand.


End file.
